Don't drill

Obama, keeping hope of compromise alive, throws a bone to the GOP and the carbon lobby with his proposal to drill for oil and gas off the East Coast. But as Martin O'Malley argues: don't go there. In some constrained benefit-cost calculation, Obama is right: if you have to drill, baby, drill, this may be the drilling you want to do. But we don't have to. Carbon is priced at well below marginal social cost, so every decision should be stop until we get closer to the margin. Ditto Keystone XL. Not a big disaster in itself, just another small tack tapped into the planet's coffin.